Children by the Millions/Wait for Brian Wilson (Happy Birthday, Mommy!)

After deciding not to go to Brian Wilson because it was too damn expensive, I managed to score a pair of tickets from work. Ryan and I went a few Thursdays ago, after several days of rain threatened to soak us to the bone at the outdoor venue. During a week that felt like everyone and everything was out to get me, nature, thankfully, cooperated.

I fretted that the evening would be a little too '57 Chevy, if you know what I mean--too many surf songs, not enough good stuff. But Brian delivered. His voice is a little thinner than it used to be, and he relies on backing vocalists more than he'd probably like to admit, but we got to see him sing all of Smile. And, freaking sap that I am, I totally wept when he played "God only knows."

I know I'm no good when it comes to coping in the face of tragedy. I've been thinking about this in the past several days, and as the 11th approaches. I'm sure you've done something--anything--and you're sick of reminders to donate. But in honor of my mom's birthday today, I made a donation to the Humane Society's Disaster Relief Fund. After all, my mom's the one who taught me to care.

In Times of Crisis, I Turn to Mike Mills

I love everything he does, design-wise. I can't wait to see his new movie. There's an interview with him on Salon that I must post:

On some level, I still have this mythology about independent directors -- you know, you have to suffer and starve for your art. But people like you and Spike Jonze and Jonathan Glazer and Michel Gondry are coming out of making TV commercials, getting paid serious money, and then making good movies. It's an exciting shift, but to an old college Marxist like me it's also disturbing. I mean, you guys are corporate whores, right?

I had that same viewpoint. I went to Cooper Union, I was a student of [German conceptual artist] Hans Haacke. I was a punk-rock skater kid, but I was bourgeois. I grew up in Santa Barbara, where my dad was a museum director. I was doing record covers for the Beastie Boys and Sonic Youth, so I was in a commercial environment in some ways. But we all left art school hating art museums and galleries, trying to find some way to work in the public sphere and still be somehow subversive. We thought, well the visual glue of the public sphere is design. If you fuck with that you're doing something powerful. This is 20-year-old thinking, but we believed it.

And then, here comes Spike Jonze. I knew Spike from skateboarding and the Alleged Gallery [a legendary downtown Manhattan art space], and he kind of fucked me up. He could be best friends with Kim Gordon of Sonic Youth, bastion of independence, and do whatever frickin' ad he wanted. And he shamelessly self-promoted. And he was doing really good work. So who cares what category he's in, right? Whether he was doing a commercial or not, it was really mind-melting.

I wanted to do film stuff and didn't have any film training, I didn't go to film school. And I wanted to do it with a certain legitimacy. I wanted to do it with a certain level of production values, with a certain mainstream-ness. I didn't want to be ghettoized into independent-land. I wanted to play with the big guys. So that meant I had to use tools that were really expensive.

I have no problem with doing videos; videos are totally artistic and wonderful and great. Doing ads is a whole different story, and I was very uneasy about it. I rationalize it as: It's my film school. The first time I made a Nike ad I had no fucking idea how to shoot a medium shot or a wide shot. I was asking people on the set, and pretending I knew how. I really felt Robin Hood-ish: I was stealing from the man.

Eight years later, I don't feel that way anymore. I'm blue chip. I'm a coveted commercial director, and it all feels like something I talked myself into. I did learn a lot, it did get me where I am. I got to practice making "Thumbsucker" for a number of years. I bought a house. And, you know, I just retired. I came to another one of these things: "What the fuck am I doing? I can't be reading Thoreau and doing an ad for DuPont. It just does not work." So I quit. I don't have a great rationalization for it. I kind of like that I don't have a great rationalization for it, and that I'm going to say it in print.

What this has to do with anything else of importance of late, I have no idea. But I love him for being honest.